Corn-Makers 225 



and most farmers prefer them. But in the southern portion 

 of the corn belt, from Columbus, Ohio, to the southern 

 border of Tennessee, the fields are filled with Boone County 

 White. This is a dent corn which was originated by James 

 Riley, a relative of the Hoosier poet, in the rich, dark soil of 

 the American Bottom on the Wabash. It is Boone County 

 White ground between buhrstones turned by water which 

 makes the fine white corn meal Southern cooks prize for spoon 

 bread. 



Soft corn (amylacea) is the type least grown in this country, 

 though still widely planted by the Mexicans and Indians of 

 our southwest. Its extra large proportion of soft starch makes 

 it desirable for grinding on the metate-stone. As for sweet 

 corn its story merits a chapter to itself later on. 



On an April afternoon in 1859, a tall, lanky man in ill- 

 fitting black clothes and with his trousers tucked into his boot 

 tops, country fashion a figure half itinerant preacher, half 

 lumberman squatted comfortably on his hams on the bluff 

 overlooking the Missouri at the raw settlement of Council 

 Bluffs and stared speculatively across the river at the westward- 

 rolling prairie. 



A little more than a half-century before, Thomas Jefferson 

 had hastened to assure a jittery nation that it was not in line 

 with the American interests to cross the Mississippi "for ages." 

 Thirty years after that pronouncement, young Josiah Gregg 

 was camped at Council Grove in Kansas, preparing for his 

 second trip of seven hundred miles to Santa Fe. The panic 

 of 1833 an d the "hell buster" which followed this four years 

 later had not cut down the westward-moving tide. Rather they 

 had acted like tidal waves, which washed a flotsam and jetsam 

 of humanity onto the cheap government lands west of the 

 Ohio. In Jefferson's day Ohio was "the Black Wilderness," 

 and the American Bottom was the far-flung west. But in 

 1859 men spoke casually of Illinois as "middle west," and were 

 dreaming of the conquest of the buffalo plains and of what 



